Brief for GIFs

                                                         BRIEF FOR GIF'S

While I was doing research for the project, I found out a lot about GIFs. A GIF is a lossless format for image files that supports both animated and static images that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite. GIFs are a lot older than I had originally thought being created in the 1980s. I had no idea that it wasn't till 2009 that they became popular. Before this I always thought GIFs where made for memes however there is much more to it than that. When you use the tools correctly you can create some amazing pieces of art out of GIFs, like Lilly Padula, and tools to improve it like Kevin Burg. It wasn’t until the 1990s that it was actually considered a type of art style when MTAA, a two-person artist collective, designed a GIF called “Simple Net Art Diagram” in 1997, which led to a chain reaction with many people making GIFs just like it each with their own unique spin on them. A perfect example being “Art Happens Here” a GIF designed in 2008 which states that art is found in the body and heart.  More importantly, I did not realize just how much work it takes to design a GIF until I had to research how to make one myself.    

I also never knew that it only gained its popularity in 2009 through the use of social media sites such as Tumbler, Reddit and Facebook. Another thing that I discovered was just how many different tools and file formats that were designed to make or help create GIFs like Cinemagraph created by Kevin Burg which are still photographs in which a minor and repeated movement occurs, forming a video clip and are published as an animated GIF giving the illusion that the viewer is watching an animation, and the files like PMG and MNG along with how the LZW compression algorithm, which compresses the file into a smaller file, was with its 2 to 256 colours and the RGB values it uses where red, green, and blue lights are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors. GIFs also became popular because of how easy they were for regular people with no previous experience to make them for themselves.  

This will be myself and my groups very first presentation and I am aware that we may make many mistakes, but I hope that myself, Aleks and Jack, can learn from these mistakes and improve so that we do not make the same mistakes again in our future presentations. This presentation has also taught us how to better work as a group, with other people rather than just working by ourselves and how to communicate and interact with our fellow classmates.  

GIFs after

The presentation of our project did not go as well as I, or as anyone in my group, made up of myself Alek and Jack, had hoped but we did at the very least get a pass mark for it and while it certainly wasn't the worst it definitely wasn't as good as we had hoped ether. During the presentation all the students and their groups in the class where using power points and slides on the screen to present their assigned projects, my group however did not use power point for our project, we discussed using slides and power point for the presentation of our project but we rejected the idea thinking that everyone would be doing it and it would not be original so we thought we should try something a little different so that we could grab people's attention when presenting it. Because we didn’t have the slides and power point to show our work, we each had to individually go on our separate moodle accounts to show the GIFs that we each had created for the project, Aleks had used cinemagraph to make his which showed a moving washing machine and a frozen sink and Jack used editing to make looped static. We also read from a sheet of paper with all our research and information on it instead of putting it on the screen for everyone to see and along the way we experienced some technical difficulty with the computer becoming slow and having errors, making our presentation go on much longer, and much more awkwardly, than it should have been if we had planned out our presentation better. At least we were not the only ones to do an “Art of animated GIFs” project.

However, in some ways this has given myself, Alek and Jack a chance to learn from our mistakes and learn how to properly present a project for our next assignment. In the future we will make use of slides and of a power point presentation even if everyone else is doing it because it will make things more presentable. This presentation has also taught me how to better work as part of a group, co-operating with other people rather than just working by myself, as I used to, and how to better communicate and interact with my fellow classmates. I have also found that it is so much easier to do these types of projects as part of a team rather than by myself as everyone does their part in order for it to be completed within the assignment's deadlines.

GIFs

After I joined a group which consisted of myself, Aleks Smyczynskiand and Jack Vaughan, we were having  difficulty choosing between GIFs, which was what I wanted to do or gaming which was what Aleks wanted to do, but in the end, thanks to Jack siding with me, we all decided that for our creativity assignment in digital media we would do a project on "the art of the animated GIF" for our project as, to me anyway, it seemed to be the most appropriate out of all the assignments we could choose from and since  we were still new and inexperienced we felt we should start off with something simple. Once that was decided Aleks became, I guess you could say, the leader of our group for this assignment. We then decided to split the different tasks to make the project more efficient and get it completed faster. I volunteered to work on the research for the project and find out as much as I could  about the history of the GIF and its place in the modern culture of today and what effect it has had on the people who have viewed them. Because I know very little about how making a GIF works, or computers in general, I just know the basics like how to print images, while Aleks and Jack decided to work on making some of the GIFs that we are going to show during our presentation. I went on to various web sites and researched other sources, such as mashable.com and flipbord.com and more, looking for the history of GIFs and how they have become a part of  modern day culture, which I have to say was very interesting especially learning about how old GIF really are and just how much variety there is in them, with some even being considered a type of digital art. 


We also decided that when we were presenting our project we would split the presentation between the three of us, I would go first and start the presentation off by talking about how the GIFs were created and their early history along with how it became so popular in modern culture and some of the people who have used it. Jack would then be the one to talk about some of the files and formats that are similar to GIFs along with some of the tools used to make them, and finally Aleks would talk about how the GIFs work. Then we would present the GIFs we created and then after which we would each talk about our individual input into the creation of the GIFs. We hoped to make at least three to four of the different types of GIFs before the deadline.